Naughty farmers

Fancy having the nerve to do exactly as the government told you to do. Its all the farmers' fault.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26466653

 

In the last 10 years maize is being grow a lot more, One farmer i know has double his crop in the last 3 years, it's a good crop for beef and dairy cattle which the farmer mix's his own food for the cows, if they could replant the field with grass it will help with the run off of water, yes the tractors are getting heavyer (24,390 tons is the gross weight limit but i've seen some t&t weighting over 38.oo tons)
Years ago farmers got paid (by the taxpayer) to make field bigger, take out hedges and fill in ditches and then they got paid to put land drains to drain the ground which the water has to go some where
Also farms have got bigger, sheds have got bigger and more cement

 

I'm sure that there's also a 'maize growing' badger/cattle TB link - google it.

 

That's the point. The farmers were paid by the government to do what they've done, and now years later, they're getting the blame for all the flooding, having done what they were told to do.

Now its looking like the government (the taxpayers, us) will be paying them again to put it back how it was.

<Rant alert>

Environmental stuff always amazes me. I simply can't understand the logic that existed a few years ago. Its like heavy industry. Build the chimneys tall so that the fumes just disperse and go away, but where? The world is a finite size. Same with land management. When I went to school they were still teaching about the four section rotation system (cereal, roots, grazing, fallow) and less so about modern intensive farming practices. At the same time, they knew then about things like water table, permeable vs impervious rocks, run-off and catchment areas etc. I know this was known about then because they taught us it in geography, and I know it had been widely known since way before my time, yet somehow the governments of the past completely failed to recognise any of these things.

You sometimes hear people try to justify these things by saying that they didn't know back then. But how could they not? Much of the same science that applies to today's problems has been well known for hundreds of years.

 

Exactly.

We've known about this sort of thing for a lot longer, even the Romans learned from their mistakes.

 

Where ever there's a + there a - if there wasn't any tax payer money up for crabs would the farmers had paid for it themsevles? and made field bigger and filled in the ditches
Edit
Any way some thing new will come along a they will be all after that (flys around a cow pat)(bee's around a honey pot)

 

It was not compulsory

Lots of farmers made there farms bigger, herds, sheds, fields too,but some didn't invest in the waste side of things, one farmer not far from me has double in size cow and shed wise, but his muck is all over the place, this year he is tipping in the fields, it's been wet with big T&T's he goes out in the fields made lots of mess he gets stuck so the muck is tip there, the fields near here are a wash with muck and soil, field, what field now, it's all liquid soil and muck and running into all the ditches yet he's had lots of taxpayers money
He is farm assured, and part of being farm assured is land managament

Maize field in the winter is used also the get rid of there muck, so some fields get plastered in it then heavy rain and it's washed into the water courses

 

Pig farm slurry was spread over the field not far from where I live the stink was orrid for two days, I glad it rained on Thursday just a occasional whiff now

 

A few years back I set off to Tesco and in the next village they were combining the last strip of a field of maize. The field was alive with rats, thousands of them. Some were jumping the ditch and crossing the road. Thump thump thump; must have ran over at least twenty. On the way back the road was a mess. One was the biggest rat I've ever seen. It covered nearly a square metre of tarmac.

 

Rat or coypu? We get quite a few squashed coypu round here. Just about the only animal that I'm glad to see flattened! The damage they do to lake and river banks is colossal.

 

@noisette47 Coypu were eradicated here in 1989, so definitely not.

 

The last one was actually shot in '89, they still haven't managed to eradicate mink unfortunately.

 

There used to be several mink around the Balmer Lawn hotel and what is locally called, Brockenhurst Beaches.